Daily Ranking Data Makes a Huge Difference

A few months ago, I added yahoo.com to my rank monitoring and set up 4 keywords just to get an idea of how Yahoo! was performing on some pretty competitive terms. What I didn’t expect to see was the major fluctuations that happen daily on Yahoo! and Bing (obviously it happens in both places since they’re using the same results at this point). As you can see in the image below, yahoo.com moves around quite a bit from day to day.

If your site was doing that and you only checked the SERPs once a week or once a month, it would probably lead to some pretty confusing data. You may see steady rankings but major fluctuations in actual traffic. This is why it’s important to track rankings daily and analyze them often.

With AuthorityLabs, you can drill down to the keyword level and look to see what may be happening. In the image below, you’ll notice numbers highlighted in yellow. Each of those represents a change in the URL that was ranked highest for that term compared to the previous day.

Looking at the yahoo.com URLs that are ranking for [flights], some days show Yahoo! Travel pages, some days show Yahoo! News, and others show Yahoo! Answers. They clearly need a better strategy for [flights] if that’s something they are targeting.

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About Brian LaFrance

Brian LaFrance has been involved in various aspects of internet marketing since 1999 and enjoys helping people solve problems. He's currently Lead SEO Analyst for CBS Interactive, runs his own SEO consulting & web development company, and speaks at various industry conferences.